from the kramer-wants-to-cancel-his-mail dept

With a loss of $3.8 billion last year, the US Postal Service is facing a challenging business climate. Mail volume fell to 177 billion pieces for 2009, from 203 billion a year before. Outside consultants have estimated a deficit of $238 billion in the next decade. So, the postal service is now considering making many changes to its business, including cutting Saturday delivery from its regular service in an effort to reduce this shortfall. Eric Zorn, of the Chicago Tribune, goes further and asks "Why stop at Saturday?" Sure, with the advent of the digital age, less and less things really need to be sent in the physical realm. However, don't be so quick to write off the USPS. The postal service still did $68 billion in annual revenue for 2009, which is bigger than either UPS or FedEx. At 44 cents, first class mail is still one of the best deals around -- sending a 1 ounce object anywhere in the country within a few days for that amount of money is a modern marvel. Of course, considering that one-third of USPS revenue comes from advertising mail, any change to delivery windows or rates will surely generate flak from that industry. That said, the USPS has had a history of profitability, so these changes just reflect a desire to return to that state, which is good practice for any business, whether they are in the public or the private sector.

from the so-much-wrong-with-this dept

Last year, we wrote about the appeal in a case involving a US postage stamp which was based on a photograph of the US's Korean War Memorial in Washington DC. You can see the sculpture and the stamp below:

There were a variety of issues involved in the case, including who actually owned the copyright, but in the end, the interesting question is whether or not this was fair use. The lower court had ruled that this was clearly quite transformative, different in nature, and did not harm the commercial value of the original work (which even the sculptor admitted). Thus it was fair use. To us, and many other experts in fair use, it seemed hard to question that logic, but when it comes to copyright, you can always be surprised by how judges interpret the law.

The Federal Circuit has ruled on the appeal and stunningly decided that this isn't fair use, claiming that it's not, in fact, transformative. I'm somewhat amazed -- as is law professor Peter Friedman in the post linked here. The two works are quite clearly extremely different, but the court felt that since they both were designed to honor soldiers killed in the Korean War, it couldn't be seen as transformative. The fact that the photographer took hundreds of images before settling on this one apparently didn't matter. On top of that, the fact that the snow totally changes the character of the image was dismissed by the court as being just "nature's decision." Update: That "nature's decision" line was really bugging me, and Friedman has updated his post to show it's bugging him too, so I wanted to write a bit more. If "nature's decision" makes something non-copyrightable, then it can be argued that all nature photography is not covered by copyright -- which goes against pretty much every precedent out there. It's hard to see how CAFC can make this argument.

While there were other discussions over who actually owned the copyright (the government claimed it should jointly hold it, since it had a lot of input in the memorial) and whether or not the photograph should not be subject to the copyright on the sculptures because architectural works can't have their copyrights cover photographs of buildings (both courts noted that a sculpture is not an architectural work), there's a much bigger issue here: why the hell did the government ever agree to build a public memorial and not get all of the rights associated with the memorial? This omission seems like a stunning failure of the government in creating this memorial in the first place. We've seen plenty of similar cases, involving copyright lawsuits over public displays of artwork -- and they all seem equally ridiculous from a common sense viewpoint. If you're commissioning a public piece of artwork, shouldn't you also make sure you get all the rights associated with it? Leaving them with the artist, and then displaying the artwork in public creates a massive sense of confusion for pretty much everyone. Your average man on the street assumes it's legal to take photographs of public pieces of artwork and to then do what they want with them. It's hard to think of any public policy rationale that would explain why the opposite is true -- and yet, that appears where things stand.

Rulings like this should be quite scary for both amateur and professional photographers. If you photograph things that are covered by copyright, you may be infringing. It's yet another scenario of "accidental infringement" that clearly was never intended to be covered by copyright law.

from the ouch dept

While Netflix has done a great job building up its business and competing with players who were much bigger and more well established, could it be the US Postal Service that finally does the company in? It turns out that those patented funky red DVD mailer envelopes are a pain for the postal service. They "sustain damage, jam equipment and cause mis-sorts during automated processing," and the postal service has had enough. The Inspector General is asking to charge an extra $0.17 per DVD mailer if adjustments aren't made to make the envelopes more "machinable." While $0.17 may not sound like a lot, a research analyst at Citibank cranked the numbers and found that it would likely cut Netflix's monthly margin per customer from $1.05 to $0.35 -- basically killing 67% of its margin (ouch). Now here's where the situation gets fun. It turns out that Netflix's main competitor, Blockbuster, does not have this problem with its DVD mailers. Remember that Netflix sued Blockbuster over its patents last year. The two firms reached a settlement earlier this year, but could this be a chance for Blockbuster to strike back at Netflix? Anyone know if Blockbuster patented its "working" design for the DVD mailers? I'm sure it would be thrilled to license it to Netflix... at a reasonable fee.